we just got a letter

maura @ 9:01 pm

Well, not really a letter, but rather a phone call. Friday afternoon, while I was in class and J was at the playground with Gus after school: our top kindergarten choice let us in! We are so so so happy and relieved: we are set for the next 6 yrs (and longer if Gus wants to go to their middle/high school), they are friendly and progressive, and no homework for kindergarteners, hooray!

On the minus side, poor Gus is not having the easiest transition. He’d gone back to his old school last week and reunited with a best buddy who’d been away all summer, and now we are making him go someplace else. He’ll be fine soon enough, and did really well today on his first day (though we didn’t make it the whole day and I was there the whole time). But of course we have a ton to do with our work and school too, so hopefully the transition will not take too long (selfish, selfish me).

Woah, it’s been so long, internets! We have been busy here in Brooklyn. First our vacation, which was lovely (read 3 books) if terribly rainy (7 out of 9 days). Then my classes started, and they are all shaping up to be pretty fun, with the papers/projects nicely spaced, too. Then the kindergarten thing. I am looking forward to a few weeks from now when we are all set in our new routines (and maybe the house will be clean by then, too).

Tiiiiiiiiiiiiiired, so tired.

no music in my head right now, just words words words

maura @ 10:10 pm

Jonathan bought us each a fun book for our week off. At first I was kind of annoyed, because they’re new (= hardcover, which is so heavy + space-sucking) and I’ve been trying to get us on the path of borrow from the library first, then buy only what we love (for money + space reasons). But I have to say, there’s nothing like opening up a pretty, fresh, tasty new book. The creamy paper, the embossed spine, the promise within. Yum, yum, yum. I couldn’t wait and started reading mine today, and it is really really good.

I’ve been fairly gorging on fiction since finishing my pop stat book* a few weeks ago. Last week I read Saturday, which was okay. I mean, he’s a good writer, and the tense bits were tense, but in the end it left me kind of eh. Which is not what I expected from a book that made all the top 10 lists last year.

* Oooh, be impressed! At least until I reveal that I skipped over the pages full of equations, that is. Then you can lose all respect for me whatsoever.

But on the other hand, Steven Millhauser, where have you been all my life? He had a story in the New Yorker a few months ago, which Jonathan ripped out for me to read (I don’t usually read the fiction in the New Yorker, having been disappointed too often). And it was fantastic, in the true sense of the world. Very much like Borges. So I casually looked him up on Amazon one day and woah, he’s written zillions of things! Right now I’m reading Little Kingdoms (SO good), and I have Martin Dressler out from the library too.

How could we have missed him? Some of his stuff seems to have come out in our post-college first-round-of-grad-school days, when all I read was anthropology and Douglas Coupland, I think. But Martin Dressler won the Pulitzer in 1997 — where the hell was I? Probably toiling too late in the early new media trenches (and partying in indiepopland), but still, that’s no excuse.

Classes start up again next week, so I’ve only got a bit longer to fatten myself up solely on inventive narrative. Chomp, chomp.

registration-free comments are back

maura @ 6:59 pm

Thanks to Jessie’s Spam Karma suggestion, woo hoo!

stop killing me

maura @ 1:19 pm

Okay, I just can’t take the blogspam anymore, so I’ve changed the options to require registration to post comments. Sorry if this bugs anyone! If you can tell me how to make WordPress more spam-proof, I’m all ears.

it’s a different walk of life that i’ve come to know

maura @ 10:19 pm

I cannot believe how quickly the summer has gone by. This has been a busy one, but a fun one. There are still some things we didn’t get to do that I wish we’d done. We didn’t go to Governor’s Island, or raspberry picking or to the sprinkler playground on the West side. We didn’t go to Staten Island (though we can do that in the fall). But we did go to the Met (and rode on the M3 as a bonus, which was a thrill for Gus: “I’ve never been on an M bus before!”). And to the Red Hook Pool, swoon, which will be closed after Labor Day (unlike the sprinklers). And just this past weekend we went pedal-boating in he park, which was fun once we settled into it. Gus’ legs are really too short to pedal, but he’s a tenacious little guy so we muddled along with him pedaling and grumping, then when he got tired we pedaled. And rode the trolley home, hooray!

(I’m well aware that I am wasting the linklicious powers of the internets by not adding links to all of those places mentioned in the above paragraph, but I’m tired and you all have google powers of your own, don’t you?)

In other news, this is my last week at work, which is all at once exciting, sad and freaking me out. More than anything it’s making the running voice track in my head into a third-person narrative, which is alternately engrossing, boring or annoying. Things like “she walked up the stairs of the subway station, counting the steps as she always did, realizing that she’d only be doing this for a few more days.” Yawn. Why can’t my inner life be more interesting than my outer?

But I am really really ready to be doing the library thing all the time. Tonight there was an orientation down at school and it just increased my agita to get with the program.

So here’s a question: why is it that I always seem to find a way to mention to my new library friends + colleagues that I have a kid? It’s odd, I didn’t even realize I was doing it at first, but even though I’m aware of it now I can’t seem to stop it, even if I try. I guess it’s because these are the first people I’ve met in a long time not in the context of being a parent (as opposed to meeting other parents at Gus’ school, for example). Interesting.

Or not, as the case may be. I like my tenacious, transit-loving kid. And I missed him tonight, going straight from work to Pratt. And that’s definitely reason enough to talk about him.

we’ll make plans for buildings and houses from mobile homes

maura @ 9:26 pm

I’ve been thinking a lot about music lately. My mom is coming to babysit tomorrow night so we can have a date, and we’d planned to go to one of our favorite restaurants here in the county of Kings. But, but, but…according to the New Yorker* Throwing Muses is (are?) playing at Bowery Ballroom. One of my favorite bands at one of my favorite venues (it’s like the Bronze!).

* okay, I’m getting my show info from the New Yorker, am I 75 million years old?

I used to see a lot of live music, in high school and college but also throughout the roaring 90s. I’ve been to only one show since Gus was born (strangely, also Throwing Muses). It’s not really Gus’ fault — in truth the show-going dropped off before he was born, around the turn of the millennium. I can’t really put a finger on why it happened. Some of it was having to travel into the city (we’d moved to Brooklyn by then). Some was the sort of dissolution of the indiepop thang that had come together in the mid-90s. People moved away, everyone was busy. I feel like a dork going to shows by myself, and Jonathan and I don’t always like the same music.

I’m sad about it in some ways, but also, not. That one show that I’ve seen in the past 5 yrs? I spent most of the time tired of standing, wishing it weren’t so late, wanting to go to sleep. Of course, Gus sleeps more now so maybe I could last longer. But it is expensive to get tickets + beer + babysitter + cab home (lazy). But #2, then I read about other folks who are in my same age + parenting boat and I feel lame, lame, lame. And I’ve had this mild obsession with Bunnygrunt for the past month or so, and they are playing** at a popfest in New England in the fall, and I am kinda jonesing to go, though me on a popfest road trip at this point is REALLY farfetched, what would I do with the boys?

** with Pipas! who I also love!

It’s been hard for me to keep up with music lately, too. I am lucky enough to be able to listen to music a lot of the time at work***, though I never seem to have the time to search the internets for the newest shiniest music that I might like. We never listen to music around the house, either (see above about our sometimes varying tastes in music). Which I do feel bad about, from a Gus-perspective. I remember my own parents playing all manner of 70s crap music (much of which I am still fond of, e.g. Fleetwood Mac and Steely Dan) when I was little, and it saddens me that I’m not making Gus go through the same.

*** and to hear what the kids are into these days, too, thanks to our iTunes shared library. Sadly, many folks seem to love Coldplay, duh.

Hmmm, clearly I’m rambling, and I’m also having a beer (there’s likely a connection in there somewhere).

Anyway, the Throwing Muses show tomorrow is probably sold out by now. How’s that for semi-sour grapes?

every word means no

maura @ 9:18 pm

I thought I’d spruce things up around here, since recently I realized that this font is kind of hard to read on a PC (since I’m so Mactastic, doncha know). So let me know if the font looks bad to you, okay? I have it set to Geneva for Macs, old school, yeah. But you PCers will have to settle for Arial.

if only the super mario theme song had words…

maura @ 3:23 pm

Hi internets, how are you? I’m much better, thanks, now that my last summer class has ended and it’s no longer Journey-to-the-Center-of-the-Earth hot here in Brooklyn. And I’ve got three weeks to catch up on sleep before the fall semester starts, wahoo!

We came through the heat pretty well in our house, and thankfully there were no brown- or blackouts in our ‘hood. There was, however, a moderate laundry crisis. Our dryer does not vent to the outside, so doing the wash on those heat index 110 days was pretty much not an option. I very nearly had to resort to washing the underpants in the sink (or stuffing Gus into his old size 3 tighty-Thomasy-s) when finally the heat broke to merely Journey-Halfway-to-the-Center-of-the-Earth levels.

And I cleaned! Yes, I used my Friday off, the day after classes ended, to clean the house. I’m embarrassed to tell you, dear internets, how long it had been since the house was cleaned, but you could use all the powers of your browser to find out how long Pratt’s second summer session was, which I’m pretty sure is the answer to that question.

So, to recap: the semester is over, the laundry is done, the house is cleaned. Ahhhh. Time for maxing and relaxing. And my last three weeks of work, which is kind of blowing my mind.

The little prince requires my help with his Super Mario addiction — later gators.

brandy on the carpet and chartreuse on the armchair

maura @ 9:29 pm

Can someone please tell me why we have not managed to make it to the Red Hook Pool until today? Seriously, we are dumb! Because a fantastic time was had by all three Smillers today. First stop: the pool, which is just enormous: a 4′ pool the size of Rhode Island with a 1′ kiddie pool + sprinklers right next to it (with easy parking right out front!). The sun was punishing, but there was a little shade on the edges and the pool was so nice and cool, it didn’t even matter that it was 90 zillion degrees out.

Next stop, the soccer field catty-corner to the pool, around which vendors sell incredible, amazing, freshly cooked Latin American food. J + I split a meltingly delicious chicken tamale and an enormous chorizo taco (with a handmade tortilla!). Gus, Senor Picky Eater, shocked us by wolfing down a pupusa con queso, which was even more surprising as he’d spent the walk from the pool to the vendors whining that he wanted a hot dog, just a hot dog, a hooooooooot dooooooooooog. And we washed it all down with a limeade. Yum!

As if that could even be topped, we decided to pull out all the calorie stops and head over to Baked (best. bakery. name. ever.) for a sugar fix (a.k.a. desperate attempt to keep Gus from falling asleep in the car on the way home*). We split a yummy lemon cake (with lemon curd between the layers and lemon buttercream frosting) and brought home a lemon lime bar and this crazy peanut butter + chocolate cake. Yum YUM!

And no, we didn’t go to Fairway (ample parking be damned, how could we ever cheat on the Food Coop?). Red Hook is so pretty, so urban yet so quiet, like a small town in the city. I think we shall go every weekend!

* which didn’t work: he was out by the time we crossed the Gowanus. We parked the car on our street and then everyone napped for 45 minutes.

In other news, that cute blond monkey named Veronica Mars is finally off our back. We watched the finale of season 2 last night. Two whole seasons in 24 days, is that some sort of record? Some sort of dorks-with-no-life record, maybe. ANYway the finale was satisfying in some ways (Veronica + Logan TLA! Bye-bye Harry Hamlin! And of course we knew the Mayor would turn into a demon!) but not in others: hello, BEAVER is the evil mastermind??? That just seems kind of contrived. And the Jackie with a kid thing is kind of lame, too. But we will be front and center for season three, on that new weird country + western network. Yee-hah!

i can’t, can’t stop, stop falling, falling in love

maura @ 12:11 pm

Procrastination, thy name is me. It’s my day off and I am supposed to be writing the paper I have due next week (last week of summer class!). I’ve taken notes on 2 (of 12) sources, and now I’m stuck. I’ve cruised through all my standard interwebs reading, made a few lists (of things to do during my August break from school, natch), answered some email, the usual procrastination stuff. I could blame it on the heat (it’s back, ugh), or Veronica Mars (stayed up ’til midnight watching last night, duh for us, and I am tiiiiiiiiired), or any number of other things. But I won’t.

Lunchtime. Food will energize and motivate me, right?